Matthew Walker

I have been involved in professional cricket as a player and more recently as a coach for over 30 years. Fulfilling a number of different roles, I have gained a huge amount of experience and knowledge over my career.

My 19 year playing career has given me a valuable insight into what makes a successful culture within a team and the understanding of working with a wide range of players and coaches.

My coaching career has been full of different roles. From a specialist batting coach to an assistant coach into becoming a Head Coach of a professional County Club. Also roles within the ECB and 4 years with a Franchise team has widened my wealth of experience enormously.

My strengths are specifically with batting and fielding but I would say that my best quality are my man management skills. I believe that you are not only coaching the cricketer but also the person. Building the relationship and the trust with the player and the team are critical to becoming a successful coach.

Coaching is based around trust. The player trusting the coach but also the coach trusting himself.

To understand yourself as a coach and to stick to the values you believe in is imperative.

I believe that a strong relationship needs to be developed to really impact on an individual. The relationship might fall into place after one session or might take weeks but until trust and openness transpires, the willingness of the player to have confidence in your beliefs and training methods will not exist.

My role as a coach is to treat the individual as an individual. I want to try and create a player-based environment where a player takes a certain amount of responsibility for his own game. I want players (with my guidance) to work issues out themselves. In my opinion, nothing is more powerful to a player than the feeling that THEY have solved the problem.

I want to challenge players. Getting a player to be open to improve is crucial. Whereas players still need to focus on on their strengths and work hard to turn them into to Super Strengths, I want to challenge players to evolve and discover different options to their game.

Although it is important as a coach to know your style and stick to your values it is also vital to be open to other ideas and methods. Like a player, we are always learning.

It is important that a coach has no hidden agendas and no ego. The best coach completely has the player's and team's best interest at heart. He needs managed passion and emotional control. He needs likability, honesty, a strong work ethic and has to be TRUSTED.

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